Customization

Salesforce Service Cloud 2 Introduces Knowledge, Answers, and the Greatly Anticipated, Native Salesforce for Twitter

Posted on September 8, 2009 by Jeff Grosse in AppExchange, Customization, Force.com, News, Productivity, Service and Support, Social Networking | 11 Comments

Momentum keeps growing in the Service and Support realm at Salesforce.com. What started as humble beginnings back in 2005 as relatively simple case management is now expanding to be the most comprehensive Service and Support offering yet; the Salesforce Service Cloud 2. With 8,000 companies already using the “current” Service Cloud platform, Salesforce has cemented their commitment to continued innovation, putting time, money, and developers behind building the best service offering available on any platform and for any business.

Service Cloud 2 consists of three parts, Knowledge, Answers, and Salesforce for Twitter

A core piece of the Service Cloud 2 is Salesforce Knowledge. Just a year ago, Salesforce saw ahead of the curve and made a strategic acquisition of Instranet, a comprehensive knowledge management company that had some great technology, but still relied on single tenancy and complex software and hardware management. Service Cloud 2 is the fully “in the cloud” version of that acquisition. Re-tooling a technology and entirely integrating it to existing products usually takes years, but just one year later, Service Cloud 2 is able to fully utilize Visualforce, Apex code, and all the other benefit already available on the Force.com platform. When asked if former Instranet customers were interested in switching over to the cloud, Alex Dayon, Senior Vice President of Product Management at Salesforce said, “They’ve been pushing us the hardest “

Companies work hard to try and share knowledge across their organization and to their customers, but most of the technology to do so is complicated to design, deploy, and maintain. Whether your business process is simple or deeply complex, Salesforce Knowledge allows for rapid deployment, easy sharing of information to as few or as many people as you need, extremely simple customization, consistent innovation and upgrades, as well as being on a trusted, secure infrastructure that has been proven reliable.

Salesforce Knowledge is priced at $50 per user, per month and is slated for general availability in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2010. (a few months away)

Salesforce Answers takes the knowledge of the masses and allows you to build on it and reuse it. Most of us look to a search engine to solve a problem much sooner than pick up the phone. The answers they find though might be dated and it’s often hard to know which answers are right. Salesforce Answers helps you build knowledge through the people who talk about your products. In turn, when your customers find the answer to their questions, they can be published to your knowledge base immediately and you gain millions of content writers.

One of the most interesting features of Salesforce Answers is it’s built-in integration to Facebook. Now your company’s Facebook fan page can utilize Salesforce Answers right out of the box and millions of people have another way to join in the conversation and contribute.

Salesforce Answers is currently in pilot and should be generally available in the first half of fiscal year 2011.

The third piece of the new Service Cloud 2 is Salesforce for Twitter, a free integration between Salesforce and Twitter to monitor your brand, and join in the conversation that’s already happening. Whether you realize it or not, people are probably talking about your products, your industry, and even your competitors. How will you be prepared to respond to what’s being said? Salesforce has a way.

Salesforce for Twitter features

Search Twitter in real time – Don’t waste your time looking for service issues, let Salesforce find them for you.
Monitor service issues on Twitter - Once you find something that needs attention, capture the conversation, see what others say, respond to it yourself, and join the conversation.
Establish an Enterprise presence on Twitter – Show your interest in the people who are interested in you. Resolve service issues before they escalate and engage your customers before your competitors do.
Give your customers a direct channel to support through Twitter – Setup your own channel for customers to directly “Tweet to Case.” Customer issues are immediately turned into cases to resolve and build a reputation of listening and response.
Integrated push of “Tweets to Knowledge” – Don’t miss capturing a solution. Once resolved, publish the solution to Salesforce Knowledge.

Salesforce for Twitter Is available now from the Salesforce AppExchange. If you’re interested in more information on Salesforce for Twitter or the Service Cloud 2, follow Salesforce on Twitter @salesforcenews.

Salesforce is proving that they “get” Service and Support. With the Service Cloud 2, they are building an arsenal of tools to engage customers, track those relationships, resolve their issues, share information, increase brand loyalty, and improve customer satisfaction.

If you’re put back by the thought of how much it costs to use these tools, you probably ought to look at what the things you’re doing today are costing you in software licenses, hardware maintenance, unhappy customers, and frustrated employees. I guarantee you thousands of companies are going to adopt this technology, pay the price, get the ROI, see repeat customers and grow their business. Will it be you or your competitors?

It’s Time to Set Your Sights on Sites

Posted on November 11, 2008 by Jeff Grosse in Customization, Force.com | Leave a comment

Sites One of the key messages from Dreamforce 08 was the coming ability to build what are called Force.com Sites. These sites are websites you can build to extend the reach of CRM and your own built apps on the Force.com platform to people who don’t use Salesforce. This extends the your ability to gather data and build some great apps both on public websites and corporate portals that leverage your data and applications in Salesforce.

Monday night at Dreamforce, the Developer Community held a Hackathon where you got a hands-on look at Sites and a chance to compete for great prizes building your first site. My good friend Johan built his first site and even won an iPod for the effort. He built a site for employees to request access to Salesforce. It could be integrated into a corporate portal and makes use of both the standard and custom fields on User records to not only allow users to request access, but you could even use workflow to auto-provision users and then assign a task to the Admin to give the profile a human-eye once over before activating it. This fills a gap we’ve seen in how to get non-users of Salesforce on their way to accessing Salesforce.

I also had the chance to talk to a fellow passenger on my flight back to MSP about how he’s thinking of using Sites. He manages franchise retail outlets around the country. They use Salesforce to track much of the information the collect from those locations, but they don’t give each location access to Salesforce. Today, they have to gather the data through email and manually input a lot of data. His vision for Sites is to open a portal for those retail locations and allow them to enter the data directly to Salesforce, eliminating any double entry and really strengthening the process of data collection. Tie that with workflow and you’ve saved a ton of time.

What have you thought about doing with Sites? To this point, Salesforce and the Force.com platform have been pretty much a walled garden of your data, and of course much of it can and will stay that way. But start thinking of what you could start managing through both internal and external uses of Sites. Force.com Sites is currently in Developer Preview, but based on history, it’s probably not more than a few months from public availability. To learn more about Force.com Sites, visit the Developer website and start imagining. There’s also a webinar you can attend on December 2 to learn more about it.

Force.com Workbook Available in the Immersion Lab

Posted on November 2, 2008 by Jeff Grosse in Customization, Dreamforce, Force.com, Training | 2 Comments

Stop by the Immersion Lab upstairs to get your own copy of the Force.com Workbook. It’s a great book of 13 tutorials to build Force.com apps in just 30 minutes. Need it today or not, stop by and take one home. You’ll be amazed what you cab do.

The online version can be downloaded here.

Search: How Salesforce Finds All That Content For Us Across Their Sites

Posted on September 24, 2007 by Jeff Grosse in Analytics, AppExchange, Customization, Data Mining, Dreamforce, Integration, International, Productivity, Social Networking, Tools | 4 Comments

Successforce is the mack daddy source for info you need as a Salesforce user, developer, administrator, executive, or competitor. (OK, you need some other bloggers too) Not a walled garden, they’ve made Successforce open to all who want to read and even contribute to the content therein. But how does Salesforce make it easy to find what you need?

The answer lies in Google Custom Search Business Edition. Ryan Pollock, a Product Marketing guy from Google wrote a blog post and did a short video interview about Custom Search with Salesforce VP of Developer Relations, Adam Gross. Adam talks about how easy it was to integrate the Google Custom Search across all their pages and ensure we find what we need, regardless of what technology their assets lie on in the Salesforce back end.

Looking a little deeper into the pricing model, it wouldn’t be hard to see a quick ROI with an inexpensive service like Google Custom Search.

Custom Search Business Edition is available in a number of plans:

Search less than 5,000 web pages: $100 per year

Search less than 50,000 web pages: $500 per year

Search less than 100,000 web pages: $850 per year

Search less than 300,000 web pages: $2250 per year

It’s good to know Salesforce sees it important to draw together all their resources for us, across so many sites. Site searches are often neglected due to our experience of them providing us little or no value. I wonder how many corporate websites could use a quick, inexpensive search makeover like this and see their customers find some real value from all the content they’ve spent millions producing.

Idea: ~~Salesforce, you’ve got a “Who We’re Reading~~” section on Successforce pointing to many blogs, including my own. How about adding our sites to your Google Custom Search Results? There’s some good content out there people would get value in finding. Salesforce heard my request, and they’ve updated the custom search to include my blog and others; proof that they’re listening. Thanks!

Technorati Tags: successforce, salesforce.com, crm, google custom search

Dreamforce 07 Breakout Sessions Begin Showing Up Online

Posted on September 20, 2007 by Jeff Grosse in Analytics, AppExchange, Customization, Data Mining, Dreamforce, Integration, International, Local, Marketing, Mobile, News, Productivity, Prototype, Sales, Service and Support, Social Networking, Tools | 1 Comment

See the sessions you missed at Dreamforce 07. They’re starting to show up on Google Video. About 50 of the breakout sessions are available already and more will be added soon.

To see what’s available now, search Google Video for Dreamforce and sort the results by Date. If you’d like to know when new videos are posted, you can subscribe to the RSS feed for new videos with the Dreamforce tag.

You’ll also find some user submitted videos of the excitement of Dreamforce as well as some footage from the volunteer project run by the Salesforce Foundation held Saturday, September 15.

As the keynote sessions are added, I’ll be sure to let you know as they are worth a second watch.

Technorati Tags: dreamforce07, force.com, salesforce.com, crm

The Google-Salesforce News You May Not Have Heard

Posted on June 7, 2007 by Jeff Grosse in Analytics, AppExchange, Customization, News | Leave a comment

June 5 has come and gone. The Google Salesforce alliance announcement that had been rumored and speculated about for weeks was made more clear. In a nutshell, Google and Salesforce teamed up to revamp the widely popular Team Edition of Salesforce as Salesforce Group Edition. What it means to the thousands of Team Edition customers is that they will now have an on-ramp to building their business through Google AdWords.

While much of the media is talking about that side of the June 5 Press Luncheon, I wanted to give you some highlights you may not have heard about. Some are quite significant and deserve more time.

Google.org was started with the same 1:1:1 model that the Salesforce Foundation began. Both companies give 1% time, 1% equity, and 1% product. Wise insight prior to either company going public made it possible to reserve hundreds of millions of dollars to be given away to organizations in need.

There are three companies that Marc Benioff has particularly high esteem for; Apple, Google, and Adobe. Apple has made elegence in design and utility. Google shares the same technology model of multi-tennancy, the availability of web services to empower applications, and an ease of use that makes it stand out against the competition. Adobe has long strived to make seamless interoperability between it’s sophisticated applicaitons and this is no better evident than in the new CS3 suite of graphic applications. Marc also pointed to the speed with which Adobe pulled the Macromedia applications into its core applications upon that acquisition. Adobe understands ingegration, workflow, and ease of use.

Google Gears will be the heart of Salesforce Offline in time. Google Gears makes offline interaction with web applications possible. This will make it possible for Salesforce to store data locally while offline, but sync effortlessly when connected, all with an enhanced user interface including AJAX.

Salesforce Group Edition was written as though Google and Salesforce were one. The start of this effort was designing the product as though they were one company. Taking the skill and expertise of both development teams, they made improvements that each would not have been able to make on their own. This is a unique partnereship that neither has done before.

Advances in the API are making a seamless developer experience. Synergies between Google and Salesforce APIs are making it possible to deliver new usable applications in a fraction of the time it used to take. Appirio is becoming the Salesforce “poster boys” for delivering applicaitons quickly. Incubator residents, they’ve been highlighted by Marc Benioff at Software 2007, the May 21 Developer Day, and at the June 5 Press Luncheon. Largely made up of software industry veterans, Appirio is driving enterprise adoption as an integration partner of Salesforce, and theiy’ve taken five products to market in record time, from ideas they heard about on the Idea Exchange. Through advancements in their API and Apex, Salesforce is making it possible for entrepreneurs to build their business on the web, with complex functionality, in a less time than ever.

During Marc’s presentation, he might not have said “enterprise” once. One analyst called Marc on this and it was interesting to see that the majority of the partnership is focused on small businesses, however, the more they learn from Google, it will surely trickle down into added functionality and usability on other editions than just Group. June 5 was really about small businesses.

June 5 was a big day for Salesforce and Google. It solidified that both companies are working together to make businesses wildly successful. They each have some expertise that will be compliment joint development over the next months and years. They also know they have a good thing going for them, working together. I can only imagine what they’ll have in store to announce at Dreamforce 07.

Technorati Tags: google, salesforce.com, adobe, apple, june 5, adwords, small business, group edition, google gears

Simple Button; Quicker Access; Off You Go

Posted on June 4, 2007 by Jeff Grosse in Customization, Productivity, Tools | 3 Comments

How do you get into Salesforce.com? Do you have it bookmarked? Is it saved on your desktop? Do you just type it each time? Is it on your Google Homepage or maybe on My Yahoo? Any way you get there, how quickly can you get yourself logged into Salesforce to do your work?

Here’s what I’ve found to be the easiest, and it’s just one click away from any web page I’m on.

It looks like this and it sits on my Google Toolbar. Apex Platform marketeer Jager McConnell created this little button and I use it every day. Kudos to Jager!

The Google Toolbar is a productivity powerhouse that takes up just a little screen real estate, but packs a whopping punch. It’s configurable and gives me access to things I need quickly, across browsers. (Naturally, easy customization appeals to most users of Salesforce)

Here’s what Google Toolbar does for me

Gives me one click access to iGoogle, my information portal
Lets me search any search engine (including Salesforce) from any page
Lets me make one set of bookmarks across PCs and across browsers
Lets me add buttons to my own applications or search pages
Lets me translate web pages
Brings spell check to the browser

Now somebody might say, “Yeah, but Firefox can do most of that.” And I’d respond by saying that it not only does translation, spell checking and more, it actually does it better than the Google Toolbar does in some respects. But for those who really want or need to be on IE, there is help out there by using the Google Toolbar.

For those hesitant to leave IE, I should let you know that there’s a Firefox plugin that puts the IE rendering engine in Firefox so saying that some application you use can only use IE so you can’t switch isn’t entirely true. I’ve got a few web apps that require IE 6.0, but now I can work on them right inside Firefox.

Bottom line, if you want to boost your productivity, give these four steps a try.

Get Google Toolbar for Firefox or Internet Explorer.
Get Jager’s Salesforce Login Button
Get Sxipper (Firefox only) Read why I use it
Add Salesforce search to your toolbar search
Technorati Tags: google toolbar, salesforce.com, productivity, toolbars, login

Salesforce Search; It’s Not Just in “The App” Anymore

Posted on June 4, 2007 by Jeff Grosse in Customization, Productivity, Tools | 2 Comments

You’ve busy qualifying a lead or some other activity in your browser and you need to quick look something up in Salesforce. How do you find it quick? Adding Salesforce as a search engine is how and the Google Toolbar makes it quick and simple.

If you don’t already have it, download the Google Toolbar for Firefox or Internet Explorer.
Log into Salesforce and look for a Search input box. Right click on the input box and select Generate Custom Search. When a dialogue box comes up type a Title and Description like Salesforce Search, and click Add. Your search now appears as a button on the Google Toolbar. You can remove that button by clicking on the Google Toolbar Settings button, selecting Options, and the Buttons tab.
On the Google Toolbar, you’ll have an input box. There’s a Google “G” with a black down arrow next to it. (On the left of the input box for IE users and on the right of the input box for Firefox users) Click the black down arrow to change your search engine to Salesforce Search.

Now when you’re on any page, you can use the Google Toolbar search box to search all your Salesforce data. You don’t have to be on a Salesforce page to do a Salesforce search.

Firefox users may want to opt for two Google search boxes by installing a plugin written by Paul Constantinides. That way you can keep one search engine set to Google and the other set to Salesforce.

For other Salesforce productivity goodness with the Google Toolbar and a few reasons to give Firefox a try, visit my post Simple Button; Quicker Access; Off You Go.

Technorati Tags: google toolbar, salesforce.com, search, productivity, search engine

If You Pitch It, They Will Fund….At Least Some Have – To the Tune of $225 Mil

Posted on May 21, 2007 by Jeff Grosse in AppExchange, Customization, Integration | Leave a comment

If you’ve watched the AppExchgange over the past 16 months, you’ve seen it grow from 150 initial applications to almost 600 today. And in that time, entrepreneurs and innovative thinkers have pitched some great applications, technologies, business practices, and concepts to venture capitalists. Some two dozen companies have already received more than $225 Mil USD in funding to develop for the AppExchange and propel them through this new age of on-demand services.

Today, Salesforce announced the formation of the AppExchange Venture Network to to bring together the people that are building the next generation of on-demand. The idea is to bring together the idea people, with the funding people, with the channel people to accelerate the growth of applications on the Salesforce platform.

It’s also the literal incubator that will most likely lead Salesforce to its next acquisition. Since Salesforce will be at the heart of forming this community, they’ll get a chance to not only be blown away by the ideas and developments of these entrepreneurs, but gauge the reactions of VCs and the market to these products and services. Koral had little more than a concept to deliver, but that was enough to grab the attention of Salesforce and not let an on-demand content management system slip away.

Who benefits from all this? Salesforce does since they’ll gain revenue from customers who want these goods. Entrepreneurs do as they get a chance to show off their ideas and get funding to deliver their products. VCs do as they get to focus tightly on products that accelerate on-demand. And lastly, Salesforce customers do as they’ll get deeper, richer, applications that help drive their business forward.

Marc Benioff’s dream of 10,000 applications on the AppExchange might not be so far fetched. The question then will be, which of 15 ways do you want to solve that business problem you initially went to the AppExchange for?

Technorati Tags: appexchange, marc benioff, salesforce.com, venture capital, koral, venture network, on demand